Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

E.g. Parallel's is only useful for people looking to run VMs locally on their Mac, but Hyper-V can be anything from that for a Windows PC to a full-blown headless hypervisor cluster with HA, shared volumes, replication, etc.

For several of the common categories, these are my takes:

- Traditional Enterprise: Nutanix [paid] if money is available, otherwise Hyper-V [paid] if a large Microsoft contract is already in place. If neither fit: fall through to acting like an SMB.

- SMB/Modern Mid-Sized Enterprise: Cloud [paid] only and/or Proxmox [free/paid]

- Tech Company: Doesn't matter, they'll do whatever sounds cool that year and make it work well enough

- Home Lab: Proxmox [free/paid]

- Windows PC: Hyper-V [free w/ Windows] (it's meh, but it's integrated - doubly so if you plan on using WSL on the side).

- Mac PC: Parallels [paid] if you need a GPU accelerated Windows guest, UTM [free] otherwise.

- Linux PC: QEMU+KVM [free], the choice of (optional) GUI client is up to preference.

Some extra notes by solution:

- Nutanix: Enterprises were staring to use this more and more even prior to the VMware sale. It's definitely the spiritual successor of traditional VMware usage in the data center. A bit less full of themselves, for now at least, than VMware ever managed to keep themselves (IMO).

- Proxmox: Has a bit of a habit of feeling like it always ends up a little broken by the time you've used an install/cluster for 6 months, but is by far the best option for the homelabber type use case (even ignoring that it's free as a reason). It's basically like someone configured KVM with what you want to be able to just (try to) use it without thinking about what's underneath, while still having access to the underneath to un-stick it in certain situations. Also does host-native containers! I never did have the guts to pitch my company try to run anything production on a cluster, but they do have reasonably priced support plans and advanced feature tiers for that.

- Parallels: Kind of sucks for the price, but there isn't anything else on macOS with the same GPU acceleration for Windows.

- Hyper-V: I think this is mostly still around because it helps Microsoft stay sticky at companies when the yearly renewal comes up. That said, it's alright - and it's also integrated into Windows in some pretty nifty ways for local use these days.

- UTM: Fantastic QEMU client for macOS, worth giving a few bucks for even though it's free.

The trap is you need Microsoft support training & strategy. If you buy unified and open a sev a, they just fuck around and assign an engineer from Antartica who works from 3AM-6:20AM Mongolian time, then reassign at 6:19AM to dude in Japan to reset their 2 hour SLA for the incident manager. In general, if you are big, you're better off buying Premier from a partner, and declaring a crit sit. Many issues are fixable by less dumb third party L2 techs, and you can leverage the partner's juice with Microsoft to get somebody. You have the ability to inflict real pain on the reseller, but all Microsoft will do for a strategic customer is send some VP of something to apologize profusely at great length and suggest the more staff meet with your TAM/CSM so they can get a dramatic reading of a powerpoint. Companies like this only understand pain, so you need leverage.

Microsoft is uniquely bad at this type of stuff. Anyone committing serious infrastructure where bad things are gonna happen when it goes down is insane for using HyperV. But you're also insane expecting a small reseller of some small company to pull your chestnuts out of the fire.